Hello Beautiful

Julia

June 1982–October 1982

Julia found herself strangely unprepared for their honeymoon, which took place at a resort on the shore of Lake Michigan. She’d spent so much time and energy planning the wedding that she hadn’t given much thought to her and William’s trip. In moments of daydream, she’d pictured them lying side by side on sun loungers, holding hands. In reality, there were heavy winds for the five days they were at the lakeside hotel, which choked the beach with whipping sand, and it was difficult for William to walk on uneven terrain with his crutches. In fact, it was difficult for him to walk anywhere. After he traveled about a hundred feet, his forehead creased and he grew pale. The steps he did take were so slow, Julia had a hard time restraining herself to his pace. She developed a habit of walking ahead and then circling back. They were both exhausted from the end of the school year and the wedding, so once Julia stopped feeling like they had to do something — explore the town, go out to lunch, look at antiques because the area was known for antiques — they were able to enjoy the last day and a half, when they barely left their bedroom.

Back in Chicago, they went straight to their new apartment in the married-housing building on Northwestern’s campus. They qualified for the housing because William would start graduate school there in the fall, and he’d gotten a summer job on campus in the admissions office, helping to reorganize their filing system. Julia immediately loved the place. It was a one-bedroom with a living room window that looked out over a quad. Sunlight poured in. She’d never lived anywhere other than the small house on 18th Place, with her parents and sisters. This apartment was almost impossibly peaceful, with just her and William. They had their own kitchen, bathroom, and small round yellow table to eat meals together.

She went with William for his checkup with the surgeon. The man examined the lacework of scars around and across his kneecap and declared his healing excellent. “Time to ditch the crutches, young man. You need to increase your walking too,” the doctor said. “These muscles need to move or they won’t strengthen. You’re a ball player, so I recommend you go for a long walk every day while dribbling a ball.”

“I was a ball player,” William said.

“Dribbling the ball is for the distraction and to get your balance back,” the doctor said. “Your wife is paying attention, in any case.”

“I’m paying attention.” William sounded offended.

The doctor looked at Julia. “Make sure your husband walks. If he’s sedentary, the knee will always be a problem. Don’t let him disrespect my work.”

The following Monday, William reported to Northwestern’s admissions office, and Julia went grocery shopping. This was delightful too. She could buy bananas, even though Rose hated the smell of bananas and refused to have them in the house. Emeline was allergic to peanuts, so they never bought peanut butter, but Julia could put a jar in her basket now. She bought cold cuts, bread, and a fancy mustard for William’s packed lunches. She took more time than was necessary, trailing up and down the aisles of the market. When she got back to the apartment, she found her three sisters standing in front of her door. Her heart leapt at the sight of them.

“I missed you!” she said. “But what are you doing here? We’re coming over to the house for dinner tonight.”

“We wanted to see your place,” Sylvie said.

Julia tried to frown, but her face wouldn’t stop smiling. She was happy to be the subject of her sisters’ collective attention. She knew she was beaming, and she could see the girls’ pleasure in causing it. “Next week, I said. I wanted to add some touches first, hang pictures. So it looked really nice when you saw it for the first time.”

“Was the honeymoon terribly romantic?” Emeline leaned against the wall, as if in a mild swoon.

“We’re not here to see your house,” Cecelia said. “Let’s go inside, though.”

Julia handed off her shopping bags and opened the door with the key.

Her sisters gave similar sighs of pleasure.

“How lovely!” Sylvie said.

It did look lovely, with the morning sun streaming in. The three visitors understood the preciousness of having your own space. When you grew up in a crowded, small house like they had, much of the dream of adulthood became living somewhere less crowded. Somewhere that was your own and didn’t need to be shared.

Julia gave them a brief tour, and then they sank down onto the sofa and armchair in the living room. Julia noticed that Cecelia was carrying something under her arm, and said, “What is that?”

“Oh.” Cecelia pulled it free. “It’s my scarlet letter, from Mama. She wants me to carry it everywhere for a week, at least. I told her I would.” It was one of the framed saints from the dining room wall. Julia stared at it, trying to match the woman with her name. She knew the saints only in context, listed in a row, on the wall of their house.

“St. Clare of Assisi,” Cecelia said.

Sylvie and Emeline looked down, as if to study their own legs and feet. Their mother had taught them lessons related to each saint, but she’d never removed a saint from the wall, much less assigned one as a traveling penance to a daughter.

Julia remembered this saint now. St. Clare had refused to marry at the age of fifteen and had run away from home. She’d cut off all her hair and devoted her life to God. She created the Order of Poor Ladies, and her own sister and mother went to live with her in her abbey. She was the first woman in history to write a monastic rule, which the Order of Poor Ladies lived by. Julia studied her youngest sister. Cecelia had been born three minutes after Emeline, so they sometimes called her Baby. Charlie liked to croon Frank Sinatra at her: Yes sir, that’s my baby. No sir, I don’t mean maybe.

“What happened?” Julia was aware that her hands were freezing and she was scared.

“I’m pregnant. Almost five months along.” Cecelia spoke the words calmly. “Mom has decided that I’m headed for a life of destitution. But I’m going to keep the baby. I’m not telling the father, because—” She stopped for a second. “Because there’s no good to come from his knowing.”

Julia shook her head in refusal. This couldn’t be correct. “You’re pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“You’re having a baby, at the age of seventeen.”

“I’ll be eighteen when the baby’s born.”

Julia felt something inside her harden. She studied her other sisters; clearly she was the last to know. They had already swallowed this news and found a way to accept it. Emeline was unconditionally loyal to her twin, and besides, she adored babies. Sylvie was disappointed in Cecelia — Julia had seen this in her sister’s eyes — but Sylvie looked at life like a story, and she would be impressed at how their younger sister had made herself a main character in their shared narrative.

Julia said, “I’m supposed to have the first baby.”

Sylvie and Emeline looked up from their feet, surprised.

“I’m sorry,” Julia said. “But this is ridiculous. You should obviously give the baby up for adoption. Why should you ruin your life because of a mistake?”

Cecelia stood, and when she did, she straightened her posture and the pregnancy was visible for the first time. How long had she been walking slumped over, with carefully arranged clothes? She was wearing a lavender button-down shirt, and the hard mound of her belly pushed the fabric outward. “You and Sylvie see us as children,” she said. “Mama thinks everyone is on the verge of catastrophe at all times. I’m neither of those things. I never wanted to go to college. I’ll study and make art on my own, with my baby. This is my life, and my choice. I’ll never be a burden on anyone.” Five foot two, shoulders back, she growled the last sentence.

Emeline said, “Mrs. Ceccione said Cecelia could move into Frank’s room and that she would help with the baby, if we cooked dinner and did chores. I’ll start college in the fall, of course, but I’ll work too. And I have a fair amount of money from babysitting that will help us buy what we need.”

Julia stared. “You’re going to move two doors down?”

“I can’t stay home,” Cecelia said. “Mama made that clear. And I’m sorry you feel like I unseated you, Julia. I know how much you like to be first.”

Cecelia said this kindly, and even though Julia’s hands were ice and she was mad at this truth in front of her — this mess — she nodded acceptance. She willed herself to stand up and hug her sister, but her cold body refused to move.

Sylvie cleared her throat and looked at Julia. “Mama asked us to tell you not to come to dinner tonight. She said she’ll receive you when her mourning period is over.”

“I’d like to leave now,” Cecelia said, “but I need to pee. Can I use your bathroom?”

When she’d left the room, Julia, Sylvie, and Emeline looked at one another. Sylvie’s face was worried, and Emeline had a mournful line between her eyebrows.

“Daddy?” Julia said.

“He’s not talking. Mama says she’s not talking, but she never shuts up. Daddy’s coming home later than usual.” This meant drunker than usual.

“They look old,” Emeline said. “They don’t want Cecelia to move out, but Mama told her that if she made this decision and didn’t go to college, she had to.”

Why? Julia thought, when her baby sister came back into the room and when her sisters filed out of the apartment. Why ruin everything? Why would you do this to us? Julia had tried so hard to do everything right, and she had. She felt overheated now and pushed open the window. She stared at the memory of Cecelia standing in the middle of her beautiful, perfect apartment in her purple shirt. She wished that they had told her the news somewhere else. Anywhere else. Julia went outside at one point and walked around the path that framed the quad. There was a bench on the far side, which she sat on until she needed to return to motion.

When William came home that evening, she said, “I think we should have a baby.”

He stopped where he was, his crutches pushed ahead of him for the step he’d been about to take. He looked like a tree propped up with wooden stakes. William was using the crutches only at home, when his leg was exhausted and sore. “Now?” He audibly swallowed. “I thought…we need to get on our feet first. Julia, I haven’t even started graduate school.”

“You got the teaching-assistant job for the fall. You’re wonderful.”

She was building something in her head. An answer to the mess, a way to fix everything, to put her family back to rights. Julia would save as much as she could from William’s small salary and give that money to Cecelia, or Mrs. Ceccione, to make sure her sister had what she needed and was okay. The independence Cecelia had shown that afternoon felt like a flag planted into sandy ground. It was an announcement, a wish, from the pregnant girl; it wasn’t who she was. She didn’t have the strength she was pretending to have, and living down the block from Rose’s tsunami of grief and judgment was going to throw Cecelia against the rocks. So more money would help. And Julia would get pregnant as soon as possible, because as a newly married woman, her pregnancy would be celebrated. It would be undeniably accepted. Julia would put her pregnant belly beside Cecelia’s. Rose and Charlie would embrace both their grandchildren, because they would come as a set. Everyone would be back together again, and there would be enough love to go around. Julia had a sun-soaked image of two babies sitting on a blanket; one of them was hers, but she wasn’t sure which one.

“You haven’t even asked about my first day,” William said. “Did something happen?” He paused and pulled his crutches back to his sides. He was now an upright tree. “You seem…agitated?”

Julia smiled at the questioning uplift to his voice. He was full of questions, and she loved him. She was full of answers. She walked closer and pressed herself against him. She reached up and undid the top button on the white shirt she’d given him for his birthday. Then the button below that. She ran her finger across the soft white T-shirt underneath. “Are you hungry?” she said, in a voice no louder than a whisper.

He shook his head.

She tugged on his shirt, and he lowered to her. This will work, she thought, distracted, as his lips covered hers and she led him in a slow, swaying, backward walk to the couch.

—

The next day, Julia took the bus from Northwestern to Pilsen. She didn’t want to go, but it was impossible to hear that news and not appear before her mother. Julia wouldn’t have been able to put into words why, exactly, but she needed to show her mother the respect of her presence.

She found Rose sweating in the garden, bent over the herbs. Heat was rising from the soil in waves; summer in Chicago was punishing. Julia knew from experience that tending to the herbs demanded the most rigor and attention to detail. Rose insisted that whoever was working in that part of the garden use a magnifying glass and tweezers. Tiny bugs needed to be spotted and removed, and a special spindly weed that had a proclivity for climbing up the herbs and strangling them needed to be caught early.

“She’s not here,” Rose said. “If you’re here to see her.”

“I came to see you.”

This seemed to surprise Rose, and she stopped in the middle of yanking out a clump of young crabgrass. She put her hands on her thighs, and Julia was able to see her mother’s face for the first time. Rose looked wrecked, as if she’d been in a car crash. All the familiar pieces were there, but wrong and somehow broken.

“I had to draw a line,” Rose said.

Julia found it difficult to bear her mother’s distressed face, so she looked up at the hot, low sky. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, words that would make her mother feel better. Before she’d found them, Rose said, “I only asked one thing of you girls.”

“That we go to college.”

Rose glared. “No. I asked you not to mess up like I did. Was that too much to ask?”

Julia shook her head, even though she couldn’t recall her mother ever making that specific request. Rose had repeated, over and over: You have to go to college. She’d never actually told them not to get pregnant before marriage. That expectation was unspoken, but it turned out to have the highest stakes.

“You girls were supposed to do more than I did,” Rose said. “I wanted you to be better. That,” she said, her voice as gravelly as the soil at her feet, “was the whole point of my life.”

“Oh, Mama,” Julia said, taken aback. In the heat of the news the day before, she hadn’t considered that Cecelia was repeating their mother’s history. Rose had gotten pregnant with Julia when she was nineteen and unmarried, and Rose’s mother had stopped speaking to her. The mother and daughter never spoke again. The girls had never met their grandmother. Charlie always said that it wasn’t a loss, because their grandmother was an unfriendly, bitter woman. But when the subject of her mother came up, Rose always turned away. She never said a word. Now Rose was the mother turning away from the daughter, and the grandchild. Rose was axing a branch off her own family tree, which meant she was both inflicting and experiencing pain.

“I failed,” Rose said.

“No, you didn’t. You were a great mother.”

“I failed.” This time she said it in a soft voice that sounded like Emeline’s. Julia had never heard her mother speak in that tone before and wouldn’t have believed she was capable of it. Julia wondered if all four girls’ voices lived inside their mother. Emeline’s earnestness, Julia’s clear directives, Cecelia’s excitement about the palette of colors that made up the world, Sylvie’s romantic yearning. Perhaps Rose simply masked her daughters’ voices with her own gruff tone, her own twist of anger and disappointment, but they were all there, buried within her.

“Look at me,” Julia said. “I’m married, with a college degree. It didn’t mean anything that you got pregnant with me before you were married. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Julia had never been bothered by the fact that she was conceived before her parents’ marriage. It wasn’t uncommon in their neighborhood, and she’d always felt a thrum of pride that she had started their family. Without her, Charlie and Rose might not have married. Sylvie, the twins, this house, would not have existed. Julia was the catalyst.

“At least Charlie married me,” Rose said. “Your sister is pretending the father doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter. She refused to tell me his name, so I couldn’t call his parents and set this right. Do you know who he is?” Her eyes flashed with sudden hope.

“No, I don’t.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Rose said to the dirt.

Julia couldn’t see how pulling another person into a mistake did anything other than make it a bigger mistake, but she kept this opinion to herself. “Cecelia has all of us,” she said. “She has our family. We can give the baby everything he or she needs.”

Rose’s face darkened. “The baby might be fine,” she said. “But Cecelia’s life is over.”

She might as well have said, My life was over when I became pregnant with you. Julia wasn’t offended, though, because her mother was seeing everything wrong. Rose was in a black mood, and so she only saw darkness. Rose scanned her garden, and Julia could tell that her mother was seeing only what was wrong with it: the chewing bugs, the leaves with holes, the possible rot, the weak stems.

Rose said in a dull voice, “How’s William?”

“He’s good. He’s barely using his crutches anymore.”

Rose nodded, but Julia knew that she hadn’t heard her, couldn’t hear her. Rose had failed, and so she was a ruin: a cracked statue like the Virgin Mary leaning against the fence in the corner of the yard. Julia wanted to say, Don’t worry, Mama. I’m going to get pregnant. I’ll make sure our tree branches remain intact. But she couldn’t say that. Her plan was just that, a plan. Not yet an answer to her mother’s heartbreak. Julia thought about Cecelia’s baby and how, unless she fixed this, that child would arrive the same way she had, on the heels of scorn and outrage. With a mother and daughter’s separation. She felt a warmth toward Cecelia’s baby, a kinship, for the first time.

When Julia left, she was worn out, as if she had grabbed a shovel and assisted her mother in the garden. On the bus ride home, she wondered what the point of her own life was. She’d never considered it in those terms before. Her father had called Julia his rocket ever since she was a little girl—I can’t wait to watch you fly, he’d say — and she was the one who fixed problems. A large challenge lay before her now, though: her largest yet. It was a ball of yarn with her entire family woven into it, which meant everyone she cared about was at stake. Her sisters, her parents, William, the babies who weren’t yet here. Julia felt a wave of fear that she wouldn’t succeed, and then quashed it. She had never failed at anything she’d put her mind to, and this would be no different. It couldn’t be any different.

—

Cecelia went into labor in late October, when Julia was almost four months pregnant. Mrs. Ceccione drove Cecelia to the hospital, and her sisters met her there. Only one person was allowed into the delivery room during the birth, and the nurse, gowned and masked, announced to the waiting room that the young mother had asked for a woman named Julia.

Thrilled, Julia tugged on a hospital gown and did her best to contain her hair beneath the shower cap she was handed. When she entered the room, she found Cecelia crying. “I want Mama,” she said. “I want her so much, and you remind me of her.”

“Baby girl,” Julia said, and smoothed Cecelia’s hair off her flushed face. This was what Rose called her daughters in times of sickness or sadness.

“I miss her so much.” Cecelia looked wild-eyed at her sister. “You wouldn’t believe it. Every day, I’ve had to fight not to go home. It’s like the baby wanted to see her. My body hates being away from her.”

“Do you want me to call her now?” Julia said. “She would come.” She wasn’t sure this was true, but she knew it was what her sister wanted to be true, and in the face of Cecelia’s anguish, Julia would try her best to alter reality.

Cecelia twisted her body under the sheets and cried out. She grabbed Julia’s hand and squeezed so hard that Julia gasped. How was her sister this strong? Julia experienced the waves of contractions with Cecelia for the next twenty minutes, feeling the magnitude of creating and meeting a new human wash over her. She wiped sweat off Cecelia’s forehead with a cloth and allowed her hand to be throttled. She was certain their mother was wrong to turn her back on this: on her own baby, on the arrival of her first grandchild. Julia promised herself that she would never be that stubborn.

“I feel like I need to poop,” Cecelia said, in a loud whisper.

“That means it’s time to push the baby out.” This came from the bored-looking nurse in the corner, whom Julia hadn’t even noticed was there. “I’ll get the doctor.”

The infant arrived — yelling, pink, wrinkled — so furious that Julia and Cecelia both cried in relief.

“She’s here,” Cecelia said, when the baby was lying on her chest.

The infant patted her fist against her mother’s skin. Julia watched her take in quick breaths and then let them go. This brand-new being seemed to be concentrating all of her tiny form on the act of living.

Julia said, “Look at her.” She wished everyone they knew was in the room with them to look. In fact, she wished thousands of people were crowded in here with them — all of humanity — because the sight was so amazing.

“Isabella Rose Padavano,” Cecelia said. “We’ll call you Izzy. Welcome to the world.”

“Mama’s not going to be able to resist her.” Julia stared in wonder at the infant. Her perfect eyes, perfect tiny nose, perfect pink mouth. “She’s irresistible.”

—

Later that night, after Julia and her sisters left the hospital, Charlie visited. Mrs. Ceccione must have told him the news.

When he appeared in the doorway of Cecelia’s room, he didn’t mention the prior five months, or Rose’s anger, or the fact that he had never walked the twenty-four steps from his house to Mrs. Ceccione’s to visit his shunned daughter. Charlie just looked at Cecelia and the baby for a long moment. Then he smiled with so much warmth it was as if a sun had risen inside him. “Hello beautiful,” he said. And with those words, Cecelia knew that she was forgiven, and she forgave him too.

He kissed Cecelia’s cheek and sat in the chair next to her bed with the baby in his arms. Izzy stared up at her grandfather, her dark eyes serious and bright. Charlie gazed down at her and said, “She’s hardly heard any language yet. Shall we start her off with an incantation, with some magic?”

“Yes, please,” Cecelia said.

He cradled the baby to him and whispered into her tiny ear: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” He pressed kisses into her soft cheek. He appeared to be sober, and he gave his granddaughter all of his love, Cecelia said to her sisters later. Then he stood up and carefully handed Izzy back to Cecelia. He kissed his daughter again. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said.

Charlie made it halfway down the hospital hallway before collapsing to the floor. A nurse around the corner heard and recognized the sound of a human body in surrender. She reached him in less than a minute, but his heart had already stopped. None of the machines or experts in the hospital were able to bring him back.